Headworx

I have finally done it. I mean I have installed Linux on my Sony PLAYSTATION3. This was my third attempt (third time lucky :), as they say). And now I am writing this post on the game console within the Firefox browser, using a wireless USB keyboard and the buil-in WiFi connection. The first attempt was to install Ubuntu following the http://psubuntu.com/ page. This basically goes down to downloading and burning a PowerPC - based Ubuntu setup ISO CD. Sony has an option in the System Menu to set up a third party operating system on the console and following the prompts I had Ubuntu running on the PS3 in less than an hour. Unfortunately the WiFi connection was not working... I browsed a few forums and soon found out the only option to connect over WiFi was to go for the Yellow Dog Linux from terrasoftsolutions.com . I ordered an install CD for $50 + P&P and run the setup next weekend after it had arrived. The WiFi did not work again, but then I had no time to spare digging for the ...

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday Google would launch a search service for mobile content. Content - based services are in their infancy now. The reason is - it is still extremely difficult to find content we really like. Take music. You have to know the name of an artist or a song title. Then you go to google.com and search for it. Or go directly to Amazon or iTunes for a purchase. This is the traditional way. Boring... Music is about emotions. How often we hear something on the radio and scream "I want it now". Artist? Title? Don't know and don't want to wait - I like it, give it to me. For a long time Pandora has been the only service close to the above mentioned scenario: I like it, give me more like this, now . But with all due respect, Pandora is hand - made in fact. There are people who listen to songs, classify them into categories - no magic, just hard work. Google announcement does not bring us any closer to a content search we would love to have...

I really enjoy watching various security - related threads on the Internet. It is just amazing how completely blind and insecure we were running our machines back in 1995. Sounds almost like the Flower - Power times. Lots of things have changed since then, but people (both lame users and experienced system designers) are still being caught by hackers and intruders. Here is the recent favorite collection of mine: New attack cracks WEP in record time. WEP is the old wireless network security scheme. Now it takes two minutes using an ordinary laptop to break it. Malware will thrive despite Vista efforts. Mark Russinovich explains why even the latest security measures won't stop malware programs from sniffing your data. Satnav hacking made simple. This story describes how easy it is to inject spoofed information into the real time car navigation systems we all rely on. How credit card data went out wireless door. This is a good one. Actually one of the most successful high profile ...

The world is on hunt for the next killer application for mobile phones and mobile networks. Last week the US went crazy over the iPhone. We talk about mobile Web, mobile video, mobile location - based services, instant text messaging, mobile email, social networks, new generation of mobile games. But let us hold on for a second. What about voice? What do I mean by "voice"? Try to explain... I talk to the handset and the other party can hear me. And she talks to her handset and I can hear her. The method and apparatus patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 , after changing the world forever, is still in use today. The howstuffworks.com site explains in detail how this happens. Important here to note is the quality of the voice conversation. The wired telephones of the past century established a tradeoff between call quality and network economics. To allow more simultaneous calls on the network, the audio bandwidth is limited to about 3,000 hertz. All of the frequencies in...

Recently I have been asked what would come after credit cards. First second I was a little shocked with the question, especially as I was just going through a wallet with several of them in it. Why would we need something else? Aren't credit cards fine? To be honest I do not miss any functionality here - the cards just work. I can pay almost anywhere in the world with a piece of plastic, linked direct or indirect to the bank account. Security? Well may be this is an issue, but if it was a real issue, we would have done something about it already. So I was silent for a few seconds after the question was asked trying to figure out the answer. And then I looked at my mobile phone. Yessss! It is so simple. It will be my next credit card! Then I even reminded myself I blogged on the subject half a year ago :) But it is worth to bring back the conclusions. Mobile phone, evolving towards a personal teleputer , is really going to be the only thing we carry with us. As it becomes a univer...

A good friend of mine has recently brought my attention to the EC2 service by Amazon . I touched this subject some 18 months ago, when Alexa opened it's search infrastructure to developers. Lots of things have changed since then. EC2, the Elastic Computing Cloud, accompanied by S3, the Simple Storage Service delivers the entire data center of any size, personalized and dedicated. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. Starting a Web 2.0 company has never been easier. Of course you need a good idea and development skills. And you still need to code your system. But the obvious barrier so far has been the start of commercial service once the application has been coded. I wet through th...

What is a projector? It takes a light source, passes it through an image (celluloid film or LCD filter) and beams on the wall in front of us. The wall reflects the image and the reflected light comes into our eyes. Very simple idea, nobody even wanders how this stuff works these days, as projectors have been with us since the Lumière times. But what about sound? Can we project sound and bounce it off the walls? Sure... every loudspeaker does that. But there is a distance between a loudspeaker and a sound projector... similar to the difference between a light bulb and an image projector. To project an image, we need to seer the light very precisely. Dim some areas, tint some other... To project sound we have been using multi - speaker setups, commonly referred to as home cinema. It takes two speakers to recreate a flat musical scene, it takes a few more, to create a surround scene and have some sounds come from the places in front of us, and some other sounds coming from behind. Basica...